Endangered Seattle

Art Skolnik is a man with a rapidly approaching—and most intimidating—deadline. Within the next couple of days, he has to raise $2 million to $3 million in order to keep the historic, silver-skinned ferry Kalakala in Seattle or risk seeing what he calls "that magic boat" sold to any interested buyer anywhere. "Make no mistake," says this executive director of the Kalakala Foundation. "We're into the last-ditch efforts here. I believe that, ultimately, this community wants the Kalakala preserved. The problem is, unless somebody comes forward quickly with cash, this beautiful old vessel may be preserved in some other community willing to pay for its restoration."

After hustling for the last six months to find a permanent moorage in or near the city, as well as financing to rejuvenate this long-neglected ferryboat, and receiving mostly well-intentioned but inadequate offers of aid in return, Skolnik might be forgiven a bit of cynicism. Trained as an architect, and having spent much of the last three decades around Seattle preservationists (he served as Pioneer Square's district manager during that neighborhood's revival in the early 1970s and was later appointed as Washington's first professional state historic preservation officer), Skolnik has come to expect a lot from his fellow residents. And he's disappointed by the tepid public response to the Kalakala's desperate straits. The streamlined ferry, which plied Puget Sound from 1935 to 1967 before being auctioned away to an Alaska fish packer, received an enthusiastic welcome when it was finally towed back to Seattle in November 1998. Yet since then, its supporters have run afoul of Coast Guard and Seattle Fire Department regulations, lost their initial bid for a permanent home on the central waterfront, and failed to rouse one or more deep-pocketed local "angels" to guarantee the ship's survival.

"The Kalakala's future is endangered only because of a tremendous lack of imagination among a spoiled population," intones Skolnik, standing outside on the ferry's promenade deck and gazing out over sunlit north Lake Union, where the vessel has been temporarily secured. "People are too busy staring at their computers and trying to find time to be with their families. I can understand that they have other things on their mind. But this isn't just any old boat; millions of people rode on the Kalakala, and many Seattleites have fond memories of it. This is a part of our history."

At earlier points in our city's development, statements much like that one became rallying cries for community action. In 1966, for instance, when Mayor Dorm Braman thought he was doing Seattle a favor by promoting plans to tear down decrepit Pioneer Square and put up parking lots, he incited architects and younger, more progressive politicians to save that original downtown core. (It became the city's first historic district in 1970.) Not much later, when a proposal to flatten the wonderfully eccentric Pike Place Market was floated, the public gave its overwhelming approval to a ballot initiative that created a 7-acre historic district encompassing the multilevel farmer's marketplace. Other prominent, once- threatened parts of our history have been rescued and revitalized, too, including Interlake School (now Wallingford Center), the exterior of Mount Baker's Franklin High School, downtown's Paramount and Coliseum theaters, broad-shouldered Union Station, and the University District's funky Blue Moon Tavern.

'WE STILL HAVEN'T SAVED ALL THE GOOD STUFF'

However, such noteworthy successes may actually have helped to breed citizen complacency. "The [preservation] advocacy network that we used to have in the 'good old days' of the 1960s and early '70s, when we were saving Pike Place Market, for instance, has shrunk rather dramatically," says Walt Crowley, a former city bureaucrat and now executive director of HistoryLink, an online encyclopedia of Seattle's past. He attributes this contraction in part to the well-intentioned 1973 creation of an official city Landmarks Preservation Board, endowed with the legal muscle to protect designated structures regardless of their owner's objections. "When you have good-citizen causes institutionalized into government," Crowley avers, "people assume that these are permanent changes and that the bureaucracy will take care of business. But that's nothing more than a wonderful fantasy."

At the same time, there's been a loss of public faith in the notion that every Seattle landmark worth saving can be protected. The destruction by fire of Queen Anne's 94-year-old Coe Elementary School in 2001, the sudden and stealthy demolition of Aurora Avenue's kitschy Twin Teepees Restaurant, even the razing of the disparaged Kingdome—all of these events and more have led locals to question how successfully they can protect their city's architectural heritage. A recent TV lottery advertisement, suggesting that the Space Needle had been sold and trucked across the Cascades to Moses Lake, unintentionally reflected just what many Seattleites fear: that even the most distinguished elements of their built environment may be transitory.

"This should be a great time for preservation to occur," says Heather MacIntosh, the preservation advocate for Historic Seattle, a nonprofit organization committed to saving our town's architectural heritage. "There was a lot of introspection during the 1990s about the state of this city. A lot of people here came into a lot of money really fast, and suddenly they had enough to transform or tear down buildings and houses all over town. Those threats raised awareness of just how fragile our past really was." But, she adds, national and state economic declines of the last two years have pretty much dried up money for "good works," leading to a "loss of momentum" for preservation activism.